How Do You Feel About Your Body?

Thirty years ago Glamour asked readers that exact question in a major groundbreaking survey. Now we've interviewed American women again—1,000 of them—to see what's changed. There's surprising bad news, welcome good news...and news that can help you love your looks.

At only 20, Nashville newbie Meghan Trainor (friends call her M-Train) wrote the 2014 song on body pride: "All About That Bass"—YouTube it. "I just wish I'd loved myself more growing up. I was so cute!" she says. "And I want girls to know that about themselves."

Way back in 1984, when hair was big and women were wolfing down grapefruit on the Scarsdale Diet, Glamour conducted a trailblazing body image survey. The findings? Overwhelmingly, women felt "too fat"; 41 percent were downright "unhappy" with their body. "I worry about looking fat or bulgy," one said. "We live in a thin world."

Since then, self-acceptance has become a movement. In 2014 alone we've seen the rise of the no-makeup selfie (thank you, Beyoncé!), celebs like Jennifer Lawrence and Lena Dunham condemning "fat" talk; and the smash hit of the summer, Meghan Trainor's sassy body-pride anthem "All About That Bass." Meanwhile women have been kicking butt in every field imaginable—commanding space shuttles, fighting on the front lines, running for president. So our body confidence should be better, right?

Wrong.

According to an exclusive new Glamour survey of 1,000 women ages 18 to 40, the way women feel about their body 30 years later is actually worse.

We were stunned. Jesse Fox, Ph.D.—an assistant professor at the Ohio State University, whose lab investigates women's self-image—helped us conduct the survey, and together we analyzed and reanalyzed the data. But the bottom line was the same: Today 54 percent of women—13 percent more than in 1984—are unhappy with their body, and 80 percent say just looking in the mirror makes them feel bad. That's incredibly heartbreaking. So we dug deeper to find out what's behind this new epidemic of self-hatred—and what the minority of women who do love their body are doing right. Their confidence—and the insights from our survey, which also looked at men for the first time—might just show us all the way forward.

What's different now

Since our first survey in the 1980s, the country as a whole has gained weight: Obesity rates have pretty much doubled for adults ages 20 to 74—people today are just plain heavier. But our changing size is not to blame for the decline in body happiness. Nearly half of the women at a healthy weight still think they're too big. And they give themselves little wiggle room: Asked "How much more could you weigh and still like yourself?" 60 percent of survey-takers of all weights said five pounds at the most. Over a third of them said not even an ounce!

What's making us so unforgiving? "The biggest thing that stands out is social media," says Fox. "In the 2014 survey, a huge number of women—64 percent—report that looking at pictures on sites like Facebook and Instagram makes them feel bad about their body." Every expert Glamour interviewed for this report agreed. We now have "a bigger platform than ever for us to obsess over appearance," says Evelyn Meier, who is researching Facebook's effects on body image at American University in Washington, D.C. The reasons social media can have such a negative impact:

Women today compare themselves to the girl next door, not celebs. You might think that the proliferation of real-people images online—of everyday, unglamorized bodies in all shapes and sizes—would expand our ideas of what's beautiful. But experts tell Glamour that's just not true. And it's because there's been a huge shift in who we're trying to measure up to: We used to compare ourselves to models and actresses, but today, our survey shows, twice as many women judge themselves against people they know. "I compare myself with my friends on Facebook and Instagram all the time," says Bethany Everett, 27, community director at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont. "With actresses, I know they have a personal chef and trainer and it's their job to have the bodies they do—I don't have any real expectations of looking like them. With people I know, it's like, Well, she did it. Why can't I?"

To test this phenomenon in our poll, we showed survey takers three images of women in a bikini from the neck down but didn't disclose their identity. Next we presented the exact same pictures with the faces, revealing actress Jessica Biel, tennis champ Serena Williams, and Victoria's Secret model Candice Swanepoel. Participants were asked how each shot made them feel about their own body; surprisingly, they universally felt worse after looking at the unidentified photos. "The anonymous woman could be anyone," explains Los Angeles clinical psychologist Jessica Zucker, Ph.D. "You don't know it's a celebrity, so your expectations change; you think that body should be within your reach." Of course photo doctoring isn't just for celebs anymore; up to 60 percent of women told us they crop, filter, or retouch their pictures—but when you're browsing a friend's Instagram, it's easy to forget that her waist might not be quite as teeny as it appears in her posts. What's more, Fox adds, "when you see just a woman's parts, as you often do on social media—her 'bikini bridge' or her 'thigh gap' or sculpted abs—you stop seeing the whole person. You even stop seeing your own body as a whole, wonderful thing."

We're always hoping for a thumbs-up. And then there's how social media fuels our need for validation, turning even confident women into "like-aholics." "On a scale of 1 to Beyoncé, I'd give myself a 7," says Kate Halliwell, 19, a sophomore at Indiana State University. "But if the selfies I post get fewer than what I consider to be an acceptable number of 'likes,' I wonder: Do I look ugly?" Those worries drive women to drastic measures. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that a third of its member doctors have seen an uptick in requests for cosmetic procedures from women wanting to look better on social media. "It's totally driven by the selfie trend and video chatting," says Samuel J. Beran, M.D., a plastic surgeon in New York City. "Everyone thinks their nose is too big, they need fillers, or that their left boob is lower than their right." Lara Pence, Psy.D., a body image specialist at the Renfrew Center, an eating disorders program, isn't shocked. "So many women have gotten onto this path of constantly needing validation from others 'liking' or pinning their photos," she says. "At the end of the day, even if you have a fairly decent body image, you're not going to feel good enough."

We're looking at more images than ever before. Finally, all this approval seeking is intensified by the sheer amount of online exposure: 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared every day on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Snapchat, and WhatsApp alone. Thirty years ago people looked at a magazine once a month and watched a little TV; "now we're constantly consuming media," says Fox. In fact, women in Glamour's survey said they spend an average of nearly four and a half hours a day online, and more than two hours just on social media alone. And our data found that the more time women spent online each day, the more self-conscious they tended to be about their body.

The growing volume of images is particularly damaging for women who do dislike their body. Research shows that when people are presented with a lot of information, we focus only on those bits of data that reaffirm our beliefs (experts call this phenomenon confirmation bias). "So if you believe—falsely—that you look worse than everyone else," says Pence, "you could scroll through 100 photos of women, 99 of whom have a body you don't find that attractive. But when you see one with a body you'd die to have, that's the image you're going to zero in on and compare yourself to."

So let's get over this already.

Perhaps the most sobering truth: Bad body image seeps into all areas of our lives—it has stopped 30 percent of women we polled from having sex, 27 percent from meeting new people, and 17 percent from dating. (While not immune to body dissatisfaction, men don't let it get in the way of their life as much.) "What's so toxic about all of this," says Fox, "is that for many women, weight and body shape are tethered to who they fundamentally are as a person—tied to their success at work, in relationships, everything. Which means, if you feel bad about your body, you feel bad about who you are at the core."

We know we should move past this, so why can't we? "The body image issue has become intractable," says social historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Ph.D., author of the book The Body Project. In the early twentieth century, women accepted their body as pretty much a given—you were big, you were small, end of story. "But by the 1920s girls started using the word image—and learned that this image was malleable with dieting, makeup, and clothes; that it was something they were supposed to control." Adds Lisa Wade, Ph.D., chair of the sociology department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, "Telling women today, 'Your body is beautiful no matter what,' doesn't sink in. Even if there's a logical argument, emotionally we're still getting powerful messages about what society thinks is the perfect body, and if we don't have it, we're weak."

Oddly enough, women's big victories in business and politics and every other area of life may actually raise the stakes in how we judge our looks. "Because of the rules society still plays by, the more successful we are, the more we have to prove we're a girl," says Wade, explaining a sociology concept called the feminine apologetic: "It's much easier for a woman to gain power when she does it in a feminine way—showing that she likes to dress nicely and is concerned about having an attractive body—because she's seen as less of a threat."

The fact that our identity and our lives are often wrapped up in noting where our looks fall short instead of celebrating them, says Fox, is "so not acceptable on any level. We have to do something." A few ways to start:

Ask yourself, "What would make me happiest?" When we put that question to the men in our survey, their top answer was "success at work." For women, "losing weight" came in number one. "It's much easier to point the finger at the mirror and say, 'That's why I'm not good enough' rather than asking, 'Why don't I like myself?'" says Pence. "You have to be willing to go a little deeper." She suggests writing down three things that would make you happy that have nothing to do with appearance (losing weight would count if it's to lower your cholesterol, but not if it's to drop a dress size). Tack them up on your mirror. Every time you look at yourself, you'll be reminded of what would really make life better.

Cut the comparing. Our survey showed that the women who were happiest with their body didn't compare themselves to others. And if they did, they tended to check out athletes, while those with poor body image eyed porn stars, celebrities, and women on social media. To quit, Pence says, "think of great qualities about yourself that have nothing to do with your body—say, everyone laughs at your jokes." Now, every time you hear yourself starting in with "I wish I had her legs," tell yourself, "Stop!" Then try something like, "Good for her that she's got nice legs. And lucky for me that I have (insert one of your go-to qualities)." Sounds silly—but Pence swears it helps.

Do an Internet self-check. When you log off, do you feel worse than when you logged on? If so, it's time to cut back. Try avoiding the aimless, endless photo browsing: "Our research suggests that it's not the total time spent on Facebook or online that is damaging to your body satisfaction, but the time spent poring over photos of friends," says Meier.

Give your body some TLC. Ninety-seven percent of women in our survey who were very happy with their shape said working out helped—and 99 percent said that crash dieting didn't. "Exercise makes your body feel powerful rather than emphasizing the way it looks," says Zucker.

Fake it. When we asked women to describe their body in one word, 35 percent of the answers came with slams ("blimp," "dumpy," "eww," "pudge," "yuck"). But 37 percent were pretty awesome ("healthy," "hot," "lovely," "magnificent," "muscular," "sexy," "sassy," "perfect," "mine"). If your answer isn't like the second set, try out a positive word for yourself; think it—and say it. Every time you do, Zucker explains, it helps rewire your brain from thinking negatively to thinking positively. Says Zucker: "It takes immense courage to love ourselves as we are, but it's very possible. I've seen it happen time and again with my patients. We can turn this around."